open source marketer and community manager

Back from San Diego OpenStack Summit

My experience at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego has been really good. I have received lots of positive comments about this configuration, merging the Design Summit with the Conference. Despite the high amount of people it seems that things went well. I’m waiting to gather more details about the remote participation to the Design Summit with WebEx, I’ll report more about that soon.

I presented one session at the conference, lead two sessions on the Design Summit track and facilitated the meeting of the APEC group. Especially on the last day I missed the integration of the summit’s agenda from sched.org into my personal calendar applications (phone and desktop) because I ended up overbooking myself a couple of times. Thankfully Monty Taylor covered for me.

The ‘Community Dashboard‘ that I presented with zAgile was received with enthusiastic comments: the crowd cheered ‘ship it’ when I asked them what they thought of the demo. I’ve talked with Sanjiva and Andrew after the presentation, we should have an early beta out there by the end of the year.

More needs to be done in order to improve the community resources: IRC channels are not owned by the Foundation, some services depend by one person only (the main website and etherpad service, just to make an example). The forums need some love and probably we should have a Q&A system in place. During the sessions Atul Jha from India showed an askbot-powered system that he volunteered to run. In the next weeks I’ll help him go live with it. We discussed also the migration of the General mailing list out of Launchpad: unfortunately I have no news since my last update. The planet needs a better look, if nothing else. And the OpenStack blog needs a better content policy: some people in the room raised some concerns over the abuse of corporate posts on it.

During the discussion on how to track OpenStack’s adoption I was suggested to focus on users’ survey instead of proposing to add some ‘telephone home’ capability to OpenStack’s code (like Mozilla Foundation does with Firefox). I think this is a good idea and I’ll make sure this will become a project of the Foundation in the next months, once we’ll be fully staffed (we’re hiring).

Monty lead the session I proposed about an Integrated Identity System among all OpenStack tools. We went through the improvements we’re working on regarding the CLA workflow and its integration into Gerrit and the Foundation’s membership database. Todd Morey was in the session and we had more ideas on how to make things progress a bit faster (we agreed that hanging out on IRC is a prerequisite for make things happen faster). The future of Launchpad as the main ID system for OpenStack will be decided after Ubuntu Developer Summit: Thierry will spend time with Canonical’s folks there to understand if it will still be able to serve our purposes in the future.

My list of things to do has increased, as it’s expected after the Summit. Thanks everybody for joining.